The Pecan Park Eagle

Jeff Bagwell
Even the Dent 0f 1994
Couldn’t Completely Tarnish
His .368 Season Batting Average

The Top Ten Houston Astros Batting Averages By Season

Bold + Italic = MLB-best

Bold = League-best

By

Bill McCurdy and Darrell Pittman

1994 will always be the year of lost opportunity and sound reason among the management and labor forces that attempt to govern the beautiful game. It was also the career year for hitting by a budding young future Hall of Famer named Jeff Bagwell.

When the failure among battling forces to find middle ground shut down the season short of completion and cancelled the World Series, 1994 would become the first year since 1904 that no champion of baseball would be determined – and the first modern time date in which there would be no formal batting champion declared for either league or the big leagues in whole.

Bagwell’s .368 for 110 games would simply be left to fly forever through the ill winds of one of baseball’s lowest chapters in history.

By 2000, Moises Alou’s .355 over 126 games looks mighty handsome to this day. It simply wasn’t lofty enough to surpass the .372 that Todd Helton of the Colorado Rockies put up that same year to top every batter from both big leagues.

Then comes Jose Altuve, whose three batting titles produced averages that easily grabbed the 3,4, and 5 spots on the Astros’ 2017 version of their all time Top Ten Highest Season Batting Average List.

One is left with the impression that the name of “Jose Altuve” is only getting started in finding its place on this distinguished list of all time Astro hitters for average. And, oh yes, there are several other positive stat categories just waiting to be filled by the feats of the little guy who just may turn out to be one of the greatest players in MLB history.

The second five places on today’s Astros Top Ten Season BA list are filled with iconic names in our Houston franchise history.

Who among us will forget the blousy uniformed, mustachioed, sometime cranky, but sharp-hitting guy that was Derek Bell?

How about early franchise figure of hope, the redheaded and hefty Rusty Staub? Rusty might have had a long and historic career in Houston, but we had a General Manager named Spec Richardson back in those days – and Spec suffered from an incurable case of compulsive change-itis. When Spec made a trade, he really wasn’t looking for a better player in the deal as long as the guy he got in return had a different face.

That GM disease cost the Astros some notable players. Rusty Staub and Joe Morgan jump immediately to mind.

Moises Alou, a guy that some of us thought of quietly as “The Stinger” for his ability to suddenly swoop into a game and sting the opposition with whatever crippling hit it took to dismantle a foe’s advantage and then redirect momentum to the Astros, is there again. In his relatively brief Astros career, Alou still owns two spots on this list.

The last three spots are filled by the other two major “Killer Bees” (Berkman and Biggio), the other pure Astros Hall of Famer (Mr. Biggio again). And the irascible Baseball version of “Halloween’s” Michael Meyers, the scary Carl Everett.

Not bad for the Hall of History at Houston’s new Castle of World Series Champions.

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Tags: Top 10 Houston Astros Batting Averages By Season

This entry was posted on November 28, 2017 at 1:56 am and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.